Search results for: “amazon”
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Taxes and the Urban Mobility Revolution
by James A. Bacon Et tu, Hugo? Del. Tim Hugo, R-Centreville, has proposed eliminating Virginia’s motor fuels tax and replacing it with a 0.9% increase in the state sales tax, the Times-Dispatch reports today. That measure, combined with the allocation of an additional 0.5% of the sales tax to the Commonwealth Transportation Fund, would raise…
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Black Friday, Internet Retailing and the Tax Base
by James A. Bacon As millions of Americans plot their insane Black Friday retail rush, trampling over one another to reach the best deals in Wal-Mart and Target, millions of other Americans are planning to sit at home and shop online. Who needs the risk of getting crushed like a fallen participant in the Pamplona…
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Another Dismaying Governance Ranking for Virginia
Add another abuse to the list of Virginia’s governance flaws: The Old Dominion ranks 5th among the 50 states for the most gerrymandered congressional districts. In a new study, “Redrawing the Map on Redistricting: 2012 Addendum,” Azavea, a Philadelphia-based GIS company, is careful to say that the metrics it applies to the nation’s 435 congressional…
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Expanding U.S. 460 and the Chinese Connection
By Peter Galuszka In the past day or so, there’s been a bit of buzz about a decades-old plan to expand the northwest to southeast route U.S. 460 takes through Virginia’s peanut country on its way to Tidewater. This latest bit of boosterism posits that giant ships inbound to Virginia via the widened Panama Canal…
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Who Gets Credit for Virginia’s Recovery?
By Peter Galuszka As with fruit tree blossoms, economic recovery is in the springtime air in the Old Dominion. Virginia’s unemployment rate dropped to 5.8 percent in January, a three-year low. The question now is who gets credit for it. Leading the “credit me” pack is Gov. Robert F. McDonnell who insists that his job…
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Richmond’s Arab Spring
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in Business and Economy, Children and Families, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Government Finance, Health Care, Immigration, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, LGBQT, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Social Services and Entitlements, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka What seems one of the wildest General Assembly sessions that ended on Saturday was actually a healthy display of democracy in action. It could presage a fundamental way that things are done in Richmond. True, a new Republican and conservative majority in the House of Delegates pushed odious wedge issues at the…
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Do Panic!!
Some readers may have taken note of Standard & Poor’s Friday downgrade of the long-term debt ratings of France, Italy and Spain as well as assorted minor European countries such as Austria, Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia and the Slovak Republic. To some, that development may seem distant and irrelevant to Virginia as legislators struggle to assemble…
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The New Road Rage: Driverless Cars
by James A. Bacon The automobile industry may not be anybody’s idea of a dynamic business sector, but it is highly competitive and more innovative than people give it credit for. The latest example is the research being conducted on driverless cars, which Bloomberg Business Week predicts could become the new “road rage,” a sci-fi…
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The Heritage Foundation Takes on the Anti-Agenda 21 Crowd
by James A. Bacon Finally, someone has responded to a bizarre sub-current of the conservative movement, the anti-Agenda 21 crowd. Wendell Cox, Ronald D. Utt, and Brett D. Schaefer with the Heritage Foundation have published a paper arguing that the anti-Agenda 21 movement is a distraction from the larger task of opposing “destructive smart growth…
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Five Miles Away, a World Apart
University of Virginia Law Professor James Ryan is attracting a lot of attention with his new book, “Five Miles Away, a World Apart,” which looks at the issue of school desegregation through the prism of two schools divided by a municipal boundary: predominantly white Douglas Southall Freeman High School in Henrico County and predominantly black…
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Evidence-Based Social Policy
by James A. Bacon In the 1980s, two University of Pennsylvania criminologists published a research study on the impact of mandatory arrests in cases of domestic violence in Minneapolis, Minn. They found that the arrests led to lower rates of domestic violence. Based on that one study, police departments across the country began instituting mandatory…
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Blocking Canadian Oil: A Descent into Bizarro-World
As I argued back in April (see “Sandy Alberta, the Saudi Arabia Next Door“), America can import its oil from our democratic, market-oriented, environmentally friendly neighbor to the north, or from anti-American crackpots like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and anti-American madmen like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Obama administration appears to be leaning toward the crackpots and madmen.…
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Planters, Merchants, Speculators, Rebels
Upon the 4th of July, one’s thoughts naturally turn to the founders of this great country who risked everything to protect their liberties. As 21st-century Americans, we look back upon the people and events of 1776 from a vantage point that views the struggle for independence as entirely natural. Of course Americans wanted their freedom!…
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The Wonk Salon, July 2, 2011
A Decade of Change in Virginia’s PopulationThe Virginia NewsletterNorthern Virginia dominated state population growth in the 2000s while many non-metro localities lost population. Racial minorities, Asians and Hispanics especially, gained population share. California Enacts “Amazon” Tax on Online SalesTax FoundationCalifornia is the latest of seven states to tax sales of in-state affiliates of online retailers.…
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COLLAPSE REVISITED
In 1997 Jared Diamond published Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. The book was a best seller, won a Pulitzer Prize and garnered wide acclaim. It was panned by some academics whose niche claims to fame and pet theories Diamond demolished. However, for most who read the book, it was an important…